Due the expansion of mobile devices, mobile Internet, and wireless Internet, electronic shopping has begun to transition from traditional wired web shopping to wireless web shopping. In other words, users that shopped via the Internet through a wired connection, now shop using a mobile terminal connected to the Internet through a wireless connection. For example, a user can shop over the Internet by logging onto a shopping website using a mobile terminal, or a user can shop over a wireless Internet connection using a shopping website client via an intelligent device such as a tablet computer.
As Internet shopping over a wireless connection has developed, websites providing shopping over a wireless connection are expected to provide users with a geographic location based store and product information searches or to proactively push some geographic location based products and store discounts. Thus, location based services (LBS) have become more popular. A location based service has two different meanings 1) determining the geographic location of a mobile device or user, or 2) providing various location related information services. For example, a service finds the current geographic location of a mobile device user or a wireless user, such as a Wi-Fi user. Subsequently, for example, within the 6,340 square kilometer limits of Shanghai, the service searches for the names and addresses of hotels, movie theaters, libraries, gas stations, etc. located within a 1 km range of the current location of the mobile device user or the wireless user. Therefore, the location based service uses a wireless communication network (such as a 3G network or a CDMA network) or an external positioning method (such as a global positioning service (GPS)) or a Wi-Fi access point to acquire the location information.
However, when the existing LBS applications search for nearby merchants or products, the LBS applications only recommend products or merchants based on a fixed distance. In other words, the existing LBS applications draw a circle based on the user's current geographic location as its center and use a fixed distance as the circle's radius. Subsequently, the existing LBS applications display or push, to the user, products or merchants within the geographic area encompassed by the circle. Therefore, unless the user's geographic position changes, the user can only view information within a certain surrounding area in a fixed manner. For example, the surrounding area could be set to 500 meters. Typically, no surrounding area information would ever be provided for someone living in a remote suburb; the surrounding area information provided for someone living near a big box retailer would always be product information from within the same big box retailer, and the surrounding area information provided for someone living near a women's apparel store would always be related to women's apparel. Consequently, existing geographic location based services are often limited to providing information within a fixed area based on the user's geographic location, and the existing geographic location based services cannot flexibly provide information that, based on different user needs, would be highly satisfactory to the users. In other words, the geographic location based services typically cannot effectively provide product and merchant information dynamically for wireless shopping.